I find myself in the fortunate situation of having had my doctor give me a note which tells me to refrain from work until February 22. This, dear reader, is largely because I was approaching Def Con 1 in batshit* terms last week, which is to say that, on top of yet another bout of low-level illness, I’d had very little sleep and quite a few doses of Big Fat Toddler Tears (they being the bit where gentle grumbling turns into ‘wa-ha, wa-ha, wa-haaaaaaaaaaa’, with fully fledged tears rolling down the indignant little face). So, I found myself going out of the room and bellowing ‘why won’t you go to sleeeeeeeeep?’. Not a happy situation, but my own, dear reader, my own, at least in passing. So, the next day, I took myself off to the doctor, because I felt the need to vent at someone other than Quercus, who has had enough venting to install an entire system. And lo! the result was time off, which felt like the most enormous present I’ve had in quite a while.

Quercus’s mother came to visit, bringing stews, casseroles and large bars of chocolate (about which I was relatively abstemious, in line with my “a little bit of everything but less than that, you greedy cow” approach to what I eat), and she babysat for us on Tuesday, so we were able to go out on our own in the evening, for the fourth time since the small girl entered our lives over twenty months ago. So, extra sleep, things to eat which I didn’t cook, and the visible nature of our progress towards a finished! kitchen! AFINISHEDKITCHEN! has meant that I am not feeling batshit any more. So far, we’ve been making the most of this breathing space by focusing our efforts on the construction of the kitchen; as you can see from the pictures, the cupboards are coming along, and shortly there will be that blissful bit where I get to put things in the cupboards, and to organise ingredients into boxes, and to shuffle things around so that the nicest mugs are at the front of the row. I so love organising cupboards; it probably says something worryingly Freudian about the way my brain works, but what can I say: it soothes my soul. And there is going to be plenty of soothing to do – our attic space, which we only gained as part of building the kitchen and bathroom, is stuffed to the gunwales with kitchen paraphernalia which we haven’t actually seen for the best part of five years, given that it was housed in the shed, all in boxes, before its recent promotion to loft living. Ahem. I have a notion that sometime soon there may be a boot sale in our future.

A knock-on effect of the kitchening is that, rather than baking, I’ve been knitting – I’m on the second of the sleeves for the small girl’s cardigan, and have finished the back and the front pieces. It’s chunky wool, so is knitting up disgustingly quickly, which is just as well, given that my patience is never exactly plentiful. I’m also finding the hardwood needles I bought for this pattern rather pleasing to work with; the yarn slides easily, but not too easily, across their gently cool points, and I rather like the twiddly turned bits at the non-business end. I’ve been fortunate with the pattern, too, which I found for free on Ravelry, and not least because some very kind and deeply knowledgeable knitters initiated me further into the bewildering world of abbreviations and slipped stitches passed over, which is to say that they translated some badly-worded pattern bits for me, and hopefully I’ll finish the cardigan over the weekend – my first actual garment which isn’t a hat or a scarf or legwarmers.

I’ve also finally managed to turn an old woollen jumper of my father’s into a felted dress for the witchling – a soft blue-grey, it felted straight off in a hot wash in the machine, and it was just a matter of cutting the bits out and stitching them together (using the antiquated sewing machine, which is going through a relatively amenable phase, the unpredictable length of which only serves to heighten my suspicions regarding its having developed a personality). I tried several times to catch a decent picture of the small girl wearing the result, but so far she’s too quick on her feet; I’m taking her repeated grins and strokes of it as an indication that she likes it, and my maternal heart was so pleased at this that it threatened to beat itself inside out. My favourite bit is the felt stars I added to the front; again, rubbish picture, but that’s what those blurry pink and yellow bits are, honest, guv.

Also a work in progress, though it never feels that way, really, is the development of the small girl’s speech. Words are positively tumbling over themselves in her haste to articulate them – three-word phrases, emphasis, repetition: we have the lot. It is such a delight to converse with her; every month that has passed has found me thinking that this is it – she cannot get any sweeter, and this is the single most sweet age that there could possibly be, in any child, at any point, and then, THEN, I find myself rethinking as the next moon changes, and something new wanders into our lives courtesy of a very determined pair of size 3 feet. Possibly while clutching a percussive instrument of some sort. (And yes, technically, and I shit you not, the ol’ Joanna counts as a percussion instrument.)

Oh, and of course it’s Valentine’s Day on Sunday. So, time for some heart-related craftiness, methinks – our tenth together. To my mind, nothing says ‘I love you’ like a lie-in, and some eggy bread on rising.

* Batshit: a term generally used to indicate maternal insanity, brought on by a combination of Not Getting Out Enough, Not Sleeping Enough, and Generally Beating Oneself Up About Perceived Maternal Failings Brought On By Points One And Two.